Thorne folded his arms over his chest. The gesture of a man who thought he was calling a bluff.
Trouble was, I wasn't bluffing.
Jeanretta's phone buzzed right on time.
“Answer it,” I said.
She didn't. She just looked at the name on the screen. I couldn't see it from here but I knew perfectly well who it was. Judge Brent Comptan.
“Leave us,” I said. “It'll be all right.”
Her eyes flashed almost as fiercely as Thorne's. “Fuck you, sugar. If that boy gets hurt, Thornhill won't get a chance to kill you because you're answering to me.”
“Bye.”
She didn't look happy, but the door opened and the door closed, and then Thorne and I were alone.
I let the silence stretch out. His pride wouldn't let him break down right away, but I was perfectly willing to wait.
The master doesn't fly to the falcon. The falcon flies to the master.
Few men, even the strongest, can tolerate prolonged silence. At last, Thorne's lips twisted in the smallest of twitches, a tiny tell an untrained observer probably wouldn't have seen. But I'd tried a lot of cases, and I'd played a lot of poker. I saw.
“I can't go to Angola,” he said.
I folded my arms in front of my chest. A mirror of his own stubborn posture.
“Look, man,” he said. “What is this really about?”
I had all the time in the world. Control. Patience. I barely needed to breathe.
“Oh, for fuck's sake. This stone man shit.” When his voice cracked, it made him seem younger than twenty-two. “Am I supposed to suck your dick, is that it? Is that what I have to do?”
I opened my arms. Gestured to heaven. Every prosecutor should be required to study theater. “You don't have to do anything.” My voice was level. Reasonable. The sort of reasonable that drives your opponents to madness. “It's all your choice.”
“The fuck it's my choice. If it's my choice, Jeanretta can be in the fucking room. I need my attorney. I don't know what your fucking game is, but there's no way any of this is legal.”
His words seemed to echo around my office. I knew he heard for himself how weak they sounded by the way he gulped, his Adam's apple moving visibly.
I looked him in the eye. Most of human communication is said without words. A funny philosophy for an attorney, maybe, but it's what all the good ones believe.
After a suitable passage of time—ten seconds or ten minutes, I didn't know and didn't care—I read in the drop of his eyelids and the slump of his shoulders that he might be ready to hear me.
“Legal is letting the process take its course,” I said. “Legal is letting you go to prison. Is that what you want? If you want to step outside the process, I can't involve Jeanretta. You either trust me or you don't.”
“I don't.” Too quick a reply. Too defiant. He wanted to be convinced.
I set up my phone on the desk between us but didn't light it up.
“Tell me the deal,” he finally said.
“It's what I said yesterday. There's an alternative to prison for first-time offenders.”
“Like drug court.”
“Sure.” In our parish, a first-time petty user or dealer could be diverted into the drug court system, do their probation and community service, and, if they came out clean, the crime was expunged. They had a second chance. “Except...”
“Except...?”
“This isn't an officially recognized alternative. It's off the books. An experimental program, you might say. A pilot program.”
“Off the books.”
“You're completely removed from your old life. Your old contacts. All the old influences that would draw you back into a life of crime.”
“Removed. Confined. How is this different from prison?”
“It is prison but it's an alternative prison. More intense. More private. It's a one-on-one experience.”
“Uh huh. And why was I selected for this one-on-one experience?”
I said nothing for a long time. He knew why. He was young and attractive. Vulnerable. His physical gifts would be a curse in state prison.
“If you choose to enter this program, you'll do a year. Two years at the most.” I had come around the desk and found myself fingering the bruise on his face. Some men would have pulled back, but he let me do it. “There won't be anything in the public records. No criminal conviction. You'll come out with new skills and new connections. You'll be a changed man.”
“What if I don't want to be a changed man?” His eyes were two sparks. “What if I like myself just the way I am?”
The falcon could fly and hunt at the falconer's command, but it was always the falcon's choice whether to return to the glove. I couldn't make the decision for him. All I could do was state the facts.
“You won't like who you are after Angola,” I said.
Chapter Four
THORNE
I had one skill. One. The ability to quickly and quietly transfer valuable things from one person to another.
Lane wanted to take it away from me.
Did he know he was touching my cheek? A possessive gesture. I forced myself not to react. In other circumstances, it wouldn't be an unwelcome touch. Those movie-star looks of his weren't hard to be close to. I didn't like that crack about Angola, though. It was meant to scare me. To control me. To herd me in the direction he wanted me to go.
I wasn't going to be scared that easily. I wasn't going to be caged.
There had to be a way out of this. Had to be.
Don't react. Don't rush into saying something stupid. Wait.
My neck prickled, a thief's awareness of the small round camera set in the ceiling. Was somebody watching us? Lane must not think so, or he wouldn't have touched me like that.
I let the silence stretch out long. Most men break pretty fast. An opponent at the poker table will call for the clock after two minutes or so.
But Lane played poker too. Hell, I'd faced him across the table in the Talokka poker room more than once or twice. He too knew how to hold a silence.
And so I nipped him. Snapping turtle fast, I caught his index finger in my mouth and bit down hard enough to make my point.
You think you can touch me? You think you can play with my face, and I don't call you on it?
And then I was standing up fast, before he could react. His hand fell away from my mouth, and I had my face in his face, and there was time for him to step back, but the way he shifted to brace himself told me he wasn't stepping back, and I didn't even want him to, and then I was kissing him. Full on the mouth. Hard, aggressive. No sweetness in it. All force and heat.
His feet scooted apart on the floor, planting themselves there so he wouldn't be moved. Our bodies were hot against each other. His lips...
They parted for a moment, the tiniest hint of yielding, and I thrust in some tongue.
Then I was back and away and leaning against the wall with my arms folded in front of my chest. I smirked a deliberate smirk as I flicked my gaze in the direction of his bulge. His face, already hot, flushed hotter.
“You think you can control me?” I asked. “You can't even control yourself.”
That slump of the shoulders again. An expression of deep sadness in his eyes. He couldn't know it was there. He wouldn't have let himself be that naked in front of me.
“All right, Thorne.” His voice was softer than it had been. “All right. I'm sorry. Maybe it was a bad offer, but it was my only offer. Consider it withdrawn. From now on, we'll go strictly by the book. It's probably for the best, anyway.”
And now he was the one who was back and away as he returned to his official spot behind his desk. He shouldn't have been confident enough to sit and let me be tall and towering over him. Not now, not with the size of the hard-on we both knew he wore.
His move threw me off but only for a second.
I told myself I was in the position of psychological dominance. He'd made his point with the night in jail, and
I'd made my point with the kiss, and now I was ready to be out of these cuffs and on my way. “You know I can't go to prison. My father won't stand for it.”
“Some things your father can't buy.”
“He'll pour every penny into your opponent's campaign in the next election.”
“Maybe he will, Thorne. It won't change what happens to you.”
Around and around and around. I wouldn't talk, and I wouldn't talk, and then he was touching a button, and a green light began to glow from a small metal box. The audio recorder. It beeped a few times. I already knew it would beep again every five minutes or so, a reminder that I was talking for the record.
Somehow he'd herded me around to where he wanted me after all.
He said the usual. Time, date, my name, his name, some numbers which apparently corresponded to numbers on a file somewhere. A lot of times, these jailhouse interviews were done on video, but he'd have to move me into one of the interrogation rooms for that, and evidently he wasn't ready to do that.
I don't remember sitting, but I must have, because we were staring at each other across his desk again. There was a tiny crinkle at the corner of Lane's right eye, the kind of thing that makes you want to reach out and smooth it away with the pad of your thumb. In other circumstances, I might be attracted to him.
Might be?
Focus on these circumstances. Focus on talking your way out of this. He likes you. He wants you to.
“Who hired you to take the Hunter?”
“I received an anonymized message at a temporary email address on the Dark Web.” I shrugged. “It's a dead end. I poked around a little, a standard precaution, but I never found out who was behind it.”
“Why would you take a job like that?”
Beep, beep, beep.
“I wouldn't. Then the money appeared in my account. Unwanted money. Enough to trigger a bank filing with the Department of Justice. That kind of crap draws attention from the feds. I needed to make it stop.”
“Someone set you up.”
“Sure. But law enforcement wouldn't put money in my bank to set me up. I figured maybe insurance fraud, but that didn't make sense either. The only thing that did make sense was somebody really did want this particular painting. Not any Clementine Hunter, but this one.”
“Insurance fraud.” Lane rubbed his chin. “Let's go back.”
“I just said it couldn't be.” Insurance fraud was a reality in the art world. Owners arrange to have their own painting stolen, and often they're too greedy to actually let go of the real thing, so they arrange for a fake in its place. But, in this case, the owner was Angelina Parish.
“The Manderson Satsuma was insurance fraud.” See, that's the thing with cops. They're like bears. Give 'em a sandwich, and they want to eat your whole arm.
Beep, beep, beep.
“I wouldn't know.”
“Did you know the Mandersons collected three hundred thousand dollars from their insurer for that garnet?”
“Everybody who reads the local fish wrapper knows that.”
He glowered at me across the desk.
Beep, beep, beep.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I know. Recording.”
We glared at each other some more. I wasn't going to confess to the theft of the damn garnet. If Lane thought he was going to use me to clear every cold case robbery for the last decade, he had another think coming.
He inhaled like a man who missed smoking cigarettes. “You'd already been paid, and then you took the job.”
“Basically, yeah. It was fucked-up, but it seemed like the only way to find out what was going on.”
“And what was that? What was going on?”
I half-lifted my left shoulder in a mini-shrug. The truth was I still didn't know. In some ways, the job looked like a gimme. You could get into the museum's alarm network from online, at least if you possessed my level of skill, and I remember thinking it was almost too easy. A tweak here and a virus there, and I could turn the whole system on and off at will using my cell phone. Sloppy security, but sloppy security isn't unknown at rural museums. They housed folk art, not the Hope Fucking Diamond. The insurer probably hadn't scrutinized the set-up with any particular care.
A cozy place, the Angelina Parish Museum of Art. It was housed in a restored Acadian cottage with a couple of live oak trees complete with Spanish moss in the front yard. Five dollar admission fee, two dollars with your AAA or your AARP card, free to the public on Wednesdays. Quilts. Rag rugs. Glass art and paintings by a few locals from notable families. The garden in back featured bottle trees and a pique assiette outer wall.
The alleged showpiece, the thing everybody came to see, was a single Clementine Hunter valued at twenty thousand dollars.
Except it wasn't. It was fake.
Everything was fake. Fuck, the pique assiette wall had been built by a bunch of high school kids in 2002.
Even the elaborate security system with its the multiple alarms and the thirty-four cameras that streamed video twenty-four/seven to an offsite company was mostly fake. Installed in 2006, it still ran pre-2010 technology. Any reasonably skilled hacker could break into the alarm system. Its only real defense was the fact nobody would want to.
Talking it through out loud let me hear how weird the whole job really was. I'd always worked alone. Ninety-eight percent of the guys in prison put themselves there by working with some asshole who couldn't resist shooting off his mouth or shooting off his weapon. But there's a problem with working alone. You overlook things because you don't have that second pair of eyes.
Hell, don't get me wrong. I knew the job was off. But I figured I could handle the situation.
Somehow.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. There must have been another way. But what?
“I'd been there for school a couple times, but I walked through the place a few days before the hit to refresh my memory.”
I'd sensed the wrongness almost from the first moment I stepped into the main gallery. I would need to take the painting in my hands to be certain, but you get a sixth sense with art. Sometimes, you just know. Why hadn't I ever noticed before? Maybe because I wasn't really looking?
A school bus unloaded in front of the museum while I stood and stared. Thirty-odd fifth graders came trooping through the room, each child clutching either a tablet or an old-fashioned paper sketchpad. A grim-looking teacher in a badge. Two stylish soccer moms in museum-appropriate St. John summer dresses.
Could none of them see the Hunter was a fake? Women who could name a dress designer at two hundred yards couldn't recognize a fake painting an inch away from their nose?
“The real painting was already gone. Replaced with a fake. I knew it was a set-up but I figured I could get away with it. Destroy the evidence. I was going to be blamed for the theft anyway, so...”
Lane leaned over the desk, and for a moment it looked as if he might touch my cheek again. “Why didn't you come to me then? We could have traced the money. We could have figured something out.”
I laughed out loud. “Yeah. Sure, we could.”
It was a new moon the night of the robbery. I sat in a black sedan near the back of the empty gravel parking lot. A strategic smear of mud obscured my license plate, although nobody would have seen me parked under the shadow of the big shaggy oaks anyway. There was nothing easier than to go online from my smartphone to enter the museum's security system. A tap, and I could see all the little night lights blink out at once from where I was sitting. According to the monitors I streamed online, the entire system was disabled. Open, unlocked, unalarmed.
It was a trap, and I put my foot right in it.
Talking this much was another trap.
“Are you the one who did this? Tell me the truth. Did you set me up? Because this is police entrapment, man, there's no way this is a legit bust.”
“You set yourself up, Thorne. What did you think would happen if you kept going the way you were going?”
I looked at the ce
iling. “I don't need the speech.”
Lane shook his head. “I won't pretend I wasn't concerned about you. I wanted you to make some changes before you got in real trouble. But setting you up for a robbery charge, you can't believe that's what I'm about.”
I searched his eyes, looking for the twitch of guilt. Oh, there was guilt there, all right, but it was another kind of guilt. The guilt I already knew about. The dirty fantasies he had about me. I could smell it on him...
He'd rather get me alone in a backroom bar, I thought. Slotting me into the system would only make it harder for him to get what he wanted.
There was something else behind this. Someone else.
Around and around. More circles.
The sheriff could be out to get me maybe, except that old boy didn't have the expertise. The feds, except they would've made the arrest themselves, instead of letting the likes of Ray Shelvin claim the glory.
“Have you examined that painting?”
“I'm a DA. I don't examine paintings.”
“It's a fake. Worth maybe five or ten bucks. Not a genuine Hunter at all. That guy in the seventies, that Toye guy, you can look it up, but he introduced thousands of fakes into the market from his gallery in New Orleans and didn't get caught for decades. There are more fakes than real Hunters out there—a lot more. And this one isn't even one of the better jobs. Not a Toye, just a Toye wanna-be.”
“Is that your argument? That you're not guilty of a felony because the painting is worth only ten bucks?”
Well, it sort of was. Alas, my story was actually true, and the truth is seldom a strong defense in the Louisiana criminal court system.
“We're going nowhere with this,” Lane said. “I'm not going to be the one responsible for telling the Angelina Parish Museum docents their Clementine Hunter is a fake. That's the defense lawyer's job. If you want to risk putting your narrow ass in front of a judge and jury with that story, be my guest.”
“Hey. My ass is not narrow.”
“You have to give me something I can work with. Something I can use to get the sheriff to pull Ray Shelvin off my back. Right now, I see zero reason not to move ahead with charging you.”
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